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astroengine (1577233) writes "We thought we had star formation mechanisms pinned down, but according to new observations of two star clusters, it seems our understanding of how stars are born is less than stellar. When zooming in on the young star clusters of NGC 2024 (in the center of the Flame Nebula) and the Orion Nebula Cluster, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory teamed up with infrared telescopes to take a census of star ages. Conventional thinking suggests that stars closest to the center of a given star cluster should be the oldest and the youngest stars can be found around the edges. However, to their surprise, astronomers have discovered that the opposite is true: 'Our findings are counterintuitive,' said Konstantin Getman of Penn State University, lead scientist of this new study. 'It means we need to think harder and come up with more ideas of how stars like our sun are formed.'"

Why the fuck should we care about the eyes of doubters of science?! Under no circumstance should we change our behavior to please those who refuse to think.

Unfortunately,as an actual science working on a federal grant, you have to care about doubters because they can affect public policy and funding decisions even for non-controversial work. Even if most of the politicians aren't actually in that category, they'll feign interest in such people to help their own agenda. And in the bigger picture, part of a scientists job should be trying to make their work accessible to as many people as possible.

It also doesn't help that a large amount of the general population has a very twisted sense of what actual science work and progress is like due to hyperbole in news covering science...